


stairway to heaven

by nidorina



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: F/M, Rescue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:46:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2721008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nidorina/pseuds/nidorina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Had anyone else fallen down that staircase, they probably would have broken something or died.</p><p>Naturally, Hope's Peak Academy's only super soldier just so <em>happened</em> to be waiting at the bottom when Super High School Level Good Luck went tumbling head over heels (HEH).</p>
            </blockquote>





	stairway to heaven

Though her schedule is identical to her twin sister's, Mukuro walks to her first class alone; though only three and a half weeks have passed since the start of the new semester, Junko has never failed to mash the snooze button again and again in the morning if she doesn't end up pushing the alarm clock right off the nightstand. Already, she has sent her sister to buy her four new clocks.

So Mukuro goes through the motions, passes between classes alone, weaves through people packed together in familiar duos and trios. Their conversations meld into one dull echo, their voices indistinct.

Except his.

“Kuwata-kun, I don't—there's just no way you _won't_ get in huge trouble...”

“Nah, nah,” Leon insists. “Like, we'll get a detention _at most_. That's all that ever happens in the movies.”

“This isn't a movie...”

The conversation lacks any relevance or importance to Mukuro at all, but because Makoto speaks, she can't help but focus through the drone onto his conversation. He makes inarticulate whining sounds of tentative objection while Leon and Mondo interrupt him with laughs and jeers. As they get to the top step of the same staircase Mukuro passes the bottom of, their voices get louder.

“Look,” says Mondo, “it'll be fine as long as we manage to get the desk out of his office. And if we're gonna make it in and out of his office alive, we need as much _luck_ as we can get! Eh? Eh?”

Before any contact is made, Mukuro knows exactly what will happen.

For her, time slows down so that she may gauge each factor against all others: she visualizes the line of Makoto's center of gravity and how it tilts against the books in his arms, maps the angle of Mondo's elbow as he goes to jab it into Makoto's side, measures the weight of Leon's hand thumping Makoto's opposite shoulder; years on battlefields have forced her to perfect the art of prediction.

The synapses through her muscles alight with familiar instincts the moment Makoto loses his balance against the first stair.

She lunges.

Time slows down.

She watches him tumble, evaluates her position—steps, swerves.

Time stops.

She stands a step behind the spot he will crash onto. His books hang in the air above him. She measures the distance in her mind. She counts it in footsteps.

She lunges. Leaps.

Time starts.

His scream cuts out when he lands in her arms like a bride. Her feet land in a firm place against the floor.

The arm supporting his legs straightens underneath them and— _whumpwhumpwhump_ —the books stack in her open palm.

For a moment, they are silent.

“Are you...okay?” Mukuro asks. That's an appropriate question, isn't it?

Makoto's mouth hangs open, but the word in his throat can't find its way out of his mouth. He nods.

Mukuro nods back, short and stiff, and bends her knees to lower him to the floor. Makoto lifts his legs over her arm, as mindful of his books and her face as he would be if they were tripwires. Once they're on the floor, he takes his books and stands as she straightens.

“Um,” he says, looks her in the face, and turns away. “Th-thank you, Ikusaba-san.”

“It was a favor for a classmate,” she returns.

“N-no, really! I thought I m-might have died just then, uh...” He scratches his cheeks, rolls his pupils up towards the corner of the ceiling. “That, uh, that was amazing.”

And her heart—she can't think of a way to describe it, really; her heart has only ever moved in the same steady rhythm because it cannot tell the difference between a bed and a warzone, but it knows Makoto and at his words it thumps, it _flutters_. In her ribcage, a butterfly's wings quiver, gossamer and gauzy and so delicate that a misstep could launch it into the edge of her bones and shatter it to bits.

“It was all instinct,” she says. Her eyes give it away, though—they must, because his smile shines against her flat tone like she speaks in miracles.

Before either of them can say anything else, Mondo says, “Holy _fuck_ ,” and a strangled, high-pitched noise comes out of Leon's gaping mouth.

Mondo scrambles down the staircase. Leon decides against moving at all; he stares and gawks from where he stands on the first step.

“Shit, goddamn, I am so sorry, Naegi, holy _fuck_ ,” Mondo says, stopping short a foot at the bottom of the staircase and throwing his hands up.

“I-it's fine,” he says, smiling, “because...Ikusaba-san was there.”

“Ah—” and something twitches in her stomach, and her chest feels light but her body feels heavy, attached to this space she shares with him—

“Yeah, holy _fuck_ ,” Mondo says for the third time before she has a chance to say anything else, but he doesn't look right at her. “That...that was...”

“Ikusaba-san!” Leon cries, and stumbles his way down the staircase. “You've _gotta_ be on my up-and-coming baseball team! Can you _imagine_ how unstoppable we'd be with reflexes like that on our side?!”

“I thought you were done with baseball,” says Mondo.

“Well, I _was_ , but Maizono-chan said she thought baseball was cool...”

“Goddamn it, dude, you're a wreck.”

“Uh,” Makoto says, “Not to interrupt but...we've gotta get to class, don't we?”

Leon scoffs. “A chick saves your life and you're worried about being on time for _algebra_? You're the wreck here, Naegi.”

That she ought to contribute to the conversation instead of staring at Makoto, entirely lost as to what to say, finally occurs to Mukuro, and she murmurs, “I wouldn't want to hold you up...”

“Daaaamn.” Leon shakes his head.

“You...don't take algebra with us, do you, Ikusaba-san?”

“I take combative training...”

“Of course she does,” Leon mutters, and flinches when Mukuro glances towards him. “Look, Naegi, we gotta finish mapping out our scheme. Algebra can suck it.”

“Kuwata-kun... Ah, how about I catch up with you later?” Makoto says, “I actually wanted to offer to walk Ikusaba-san to class...”

Something lights up in Leon's expression and, with a grin and a snicker, he elbows Mondo in the side. Mondo snorts and returns the hit; Leon stumbles, barely catching himself.

“IIIII gotcha,” says Leon. “I gotcha. All right, Naegi, we'll leave you be! Give us a holler when you're done and we'll catch up on our plans, cool?”

“Sure thing, Kuwata-kun...”

“Later, man!” Mondo calls over his shoulder as he turns to follow Leon down the hall. “S-sorry again...”

As they leave, their excited whispers become part of the background susurrus, no more important than anything else surrounding Mukuro—except him. There are other students in the hallways whose focuses have now shifted from the spectacle back to making sure they aren't tardy for their next class or to whatever diversion they're using to avoid class entirely, but they're strangers; for Mukuro, there's only the two of them.

“Thank you, Ikusaba-san,” says Makoto, and her heart—why does it keep _doing that_ , making her insides feel weightless except where they twist with...nervousness? Is she _nervous_? She has faced entire armies, sprinted across barren fields with gunned soldiers at the other side with nothing but a knife between her teeth, and she has never been nervous.

“...You're welcome,” she finally says, and her voice has never been so soft. The corners of her lips twitch and she cannot see herself, cannot say for certain, but she thinks she is smiling.

And he does walk her to class, ignoring her insistence that he'll be late for his own. He has enough questions about her combative training class ( _what is it like, what do you do_ ) to fill up the whole walk there despite her short answers, because she has never had to think about what combat training is _like_. She looks away as she finishes, unable to muster up anything less pithy, but his eyes still shine with interest.

There is weight in her heart when they part with Makoto's promise that he'll meet her once class ends to walk her to their shared next period, too. She says, “I'd like that,” and the way his expression lights up brings back that feeling in the muscles along her lips that must be a smile.

Just his luck; the bell rings as soon as she's seated and accounted for.

It will take time for her to recognize the seed of hope Makoto has planted within her, but she can feel it heavy inside her empty self, grounding her though she has always been without weight or purpose, drawing her back to him, wanting to hear him say _because Ikusaba-san was there_ again—wanting to _be there_ again.

(And she isn't there to see the way Junko stares at Makoto at lunch that afternoon, one hand propping up her face as she drums the pointed fake nails of her other hand against the table. She wears a wide, tight-lipped smile, eyes narrowed as she watches him gush to wide-eyed Chihiro and contemplative Sakura that she saved his life, she's so incredible—

Junko knows that the seed of hope has been planted in her sister's heart, and though she will forbid it from blooming enough to change that disappointing girl, she'll let the seed grow and fester enough for her to get a grip around its spreading branches. By the time she moves to tear it apart, though, the roots will have grown too deep and steadfast for Mukuro Ikusaba to ever truly belong to despair.)

**Author's Note:**

> [keyholecat](http://keyholecat.tumblr.com/) proofread this for me! What a swell fella.
> 
> Additional shoutout to [Roxy](http://doctorlemon.tumblr.com/), from whose fingers came the typed words "name it stairway to heaven fuckin do it" (good thing, too; the original title here was "AND DON'T BE SURPRISED IF I FALL HEAD OVER FEET" and that was just pathetic).
> 
> I literally started this in _January_. It has since received enough edits and rewrites to become its own Ship Of Theseus equivalent, and I am so tired of looking at it.


End file.
